Lixiss was created to light dreamplanes. She lights dreamers instead — which nobody ordered, nobody can explain. She has decided not to think about too hard, because there's work to do. Every night she walks into the dreams of strangers on a hundred worlds and hands them back their light. Every morning she comes home to Mother's kitchen, where dinner is served by color, her brothers are too loud, her sisters too quiet, and nobody asks her anything difficult.

But Yade does.

She is a mechanic who can't fix machines. She builds houses out of dream dust on a road nobody remembers. She takes her time getting to the end of a sentence, and she keeps saying the one thing Lixiss would rather not hear.

When Dreamlanders stop being useful, they disappear, and everybody forgets they were ever here.

Lixiss thinks she worries too much.

Then a dream lord goes dark — a woman who clawed her way out of the lowest caste class of her world and made it into godhood, is now buried alive inside her own dream and leaking something that eats dreams — and Lixiss makes the mistake of saving her. By morning, the dream lords have issued a notice for her capture, and Yade's worrying is starting to make a lot more sense.

Past the edge of every Place, there's a room full of boxes. Every box has a person in it. Every one of them was born to the wrong class, or the wrong gift, or the wrong life, and the light inside each one is going out on schedule.

Lixiss has one broken road, a mechanic who isn't a mechanic, a cleaner's daughter who can heal anything, and a world that keeps choosing them long after its gods stopped.

Does she answer Dreamland’s call? Or does she blink out of existence in the box the gods put her in?

For readers of Blood Over Bright Haven and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.